March 27, 2007

Ireland's Energy Sugar Rush

If you still suffer from the delusion that we live
in a democracy, then Ireland’s prospective new energy policy should
open your eyes. Last Sunday saw the publication of the Green Paper on
energy, the most significant planning document on energy for 20 years.
The Green Paper promises investment in new technologies and a new focus
on protecting the environment.

However, as usually happens in
Irish politics, politicians are instead granting privileges to special
interests at the expense of the public. All that is new is that this is
now justified by doubtful claims as to the environmental benefits and
cost advantages of renewable energy. In the 1970s, haunted by the fear
of ever-more expensive oil, the government invested in the huge
Moneypoint generating plant in Co Clare, powered by coal. The feared
oil shock never materialised....The Green Paper, echoing the Oireachtas
committee’s report, makes a heavy rhetorical commitment to renewable
energy, in spite of the cost disadvantages. It stresses biofuels
extracted from fuel crops such as rape, wheat or sugar beet as a route
towards lower energy costs and environmental protection. Here we see
the farming lobby triumphant. Domestic sugar beet is offered as a
solution - as if Ireland is akin to a boggy Kuwait. The fairyland
economics of European agriculture seriously distort the economics of
biofuels. Brazilian sugar cane can produce ethanol for transport at
about a third of the cost of crops grown in western Europe, according
to the IEA, but faces tariff barriers that make it uneconomic.

The
use of biofuels to deliver reductions in greenhouse gases that cause
global warming is also doubtful. Each ton of carbon dioxide avoided,
the IEA estimates, comes at a cost of some $200 to $400. This is more
than ten times the cost of alternatives, like sponsoring clean energy
projects in developing countries through Kyoto’s clean development
mechanism or buying reductions through the EU emissions trading system.

In essence, with the CAP in slow and painful decline, the Irish farming lobby have formed an alliance with idiotic politicians and cyncial bureaucrats to lock in subsidies for the domestic production of biofuels - rape, wood and even sugarbeet, uneconomic even at the peak of oil prices and yielding no environmental benefit. For the Irish public, too much sugar in the diet is bound to be unhealthy.